


To All the Lights We've Lost Before

by Iron



Category: Lost Light - Fandom, The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Lost Light Festival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-02
Updated: 2018-10-04
Packaged: 2019-07-23 16:20:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16162481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iron/pseuds/Iron
Summary: Entries for the Lost Light Festival.1. Ultra Magnus - He used to have his own name.2. Rodimus - This is a new Cybertron.3. Drift - Post-war4. Ratchet - Dead Ends and ruined hands--Chapters to be expanded when I'm not so busy.





	1. Chapter 1

When he was young, the first thing he remembers, really, when everything before has been lost to data corruption and time and purposeful ignorance, when he was young his brother would take him into the wilds around Iacon and they'd romp through the crystal growth, trimming trees with their fangs and refusing to speak. His brother had called it a return to nature. He'd called it madness and gone along anyways. 

This was, he thinks, before the Functionalists. He doesn't truly know, and it bothers him. It's part of why he doesn't like to think about these things. He doesn't like not knowing. It was only a few days a year, maybe three, maybe more. They would wander back into the city and they'd laze about on the sofa chair like a pair of commas on a page with too few words, and his brother would clean his plating with his glossa and laugh his fox-laugh, and they would make a silent challenge of who could outlast the other in transforming to root mode. He usually one. Dominas was, before anything else, an impatient mech. 

The outings stopped when his brother took his first shell. Minimus remembers stepping into their parlor and seeing it standing in the middle of their silvered and blue floor and thinking it was a monster. A dead mech. A _thing_. His brother had turned and smiled at him, thrilled, his spines puffed out with pride. 

Minimus had hated the shell. It hadn't looked like his brother at all. His had, at least, but then his alt-mode had already looked like something bland and normal. His brother had been magnificent, as the older, larger, _better_ brother's right, Minimus had tried not to feel jealousy over it. And his brother had thrown it away for something larger and cumbersome and overwrought. He'd helped his brother into it, though, and he never said a word when the outings he'd so professed to hating had ended. He'd learned why soon enough anyway; his brother wanted to be someone Important. Wanted to be more than the Enforcer Minimus had entered training for. Beastformers don't become important people anymore. He'd learned to accept it quietly, even as his brother scrubbed any sign of what they were - are - _should be_. 

His brother had deserved the choice, of pride or importance, and anyways Minimus had learned better. His own refusal to change would have gotten him killed if Dominus hadn't secured his altmode-exemption. 

And when he'd stepped into his first shell, felt the pull on his spark as it expanded to power the new armor, he'd understood. 

With the shell came protection. The Functionalists allowed him more when he was like this, when he was something _acceptable_. Later, so did Prime's army. There was nothing good that came from being a beast. 

When Tyrest asked him to don the Magnus Armor, to smother Minimus in the weight of a legacy more than his brother's, he knew his answers before he gave it. He could no longer remember what Cybertron's sun felt like, beating down on his spine and tail, or the way his brother's glossa would groom him. There was only the clash of guns and metal in his audials, energon on his plating, the stench of burned metal and melted plastic. The dead. The dying. His brother, name almost forgotten, gone for so long that Minimus no longer remembers where he was serving when he offlined. 

Cybertron had been dead before he'd taken up the mantle he'd been prepared to offline in. His brother had been dead for nearly as long.

When he stepped out of that false-shell, the one beneath the Magnus armor, for the first time in millenia, he'd tasted crystals on his glossa.


	2. Rodimus

The ground was cold in Iacon. It's the first thing he really noticed, in the bunks, in training, in the city; the ground was always cold. 

Nyon had never been cold. The sky was full of smog that trapped the heat generated by the factories inside, and it was rarely less than sweltering in the city. Around the edges, where the buildings gave way to rust and loose ground, it was cooler. But the ground was always warm. The mechs he'd ran with had always said it was because Nyon was the most alive city on Cybertron. Breathing, pulsing, talking. _The city's alive,_ they'd say, _you protect it, mech. We Nyans, we protect our city._. He understands, now. 

Iacon was nothing but dead metal and dead hopes and sucrose in oil. 

He'd thought that until the moment he'd stepped off of it. After a while he forgot about it. About Iacon and Nyan both, really. What was there to remember but rust and mechs he couldn't save? It wasn't worth remembering when there was a war to fight. 

And then Cybertron died, and nothing really mattered after but people. 

Rodimus steps through the wilds of Iacon, and his peds sink through warm detritus. Heat blurs the skyline, wafts against his plating, curls around his spoiler hub. This isn't the raw and wild warmth of fire; it's gentle. Nothing else about this new world is gentle. It remembers who killed it. He can't say he blames it for lashing out like this. 

He hadn't told the others he was coming. They would have stopped him, and he needed to see this: the world reborn, and the great bloom of a life he'd only seen the rotting carcass of in Nyon. Something skitters past his peds and he stops to watch the hydrolizard slink into the thin metal spirals of an outcropping. _Life_ , he thinks. It's beautiful.


	3. Drift

Laughter drifts down the hall. 

The air is gold with joy. He can hear mechs talking, hands slapping plating playfully, music threading through it all. It's the sound of happiness, he knows now, like the smell of fresh titrillium bites that lingers in the bar before movie nights. Joy. He'd never thought he'd get to have something like this, and he has it almost every night now. His friends around him, his _family_ , with a mate grumbling in a corner when he's not being distracted from his own grumpiness. 

It's not perfect, but it's better than perfect - it's real. 

All it cost him was four millenia of war and an entire planet. It doesn't feel like a loss, when he slaps Swerve's shoulder and grabs a drink for him and Rodimus. This is more a home than Cybetron had ever been. Mechs still talk about the times before the War, if rarely, and always with an edge of longing in their voices. He doesn't understand it. Cybertron _before_ was all gilt and grey, and now things are different. Better. He doesn't know a mech in the gutters that doesn't choose to be there, and most of those not even for long before someone helps them. No one has to live like he did, anymore. Isn't that better? 

He doesn't say that out loud. It's not bad, anymore, being from where he's from, but he doesn't talk about it just in case someone realizes Drift isn't _Drift_ , even if most of the administrative records went to slag with the rest of the planet. He has his secrets to keep. He's still technically a war criminal. 

He slides into the booth next to Rodimus, shoulders and hips knocking, fields entangling familiarly. "See anything good?" 

"Rewind slipped and fell on his face." 

"Mm." When he leans in he can smell Rodimus' polish, and it's spice and glittery and nothing like they'd bought for themselves during the war. Polishing didn't matter when you're going to get shot at, or so Rodimus had set when he spent the week still soot-black from meteor surfing when they were both rookies. "You should respect his ability to dance at all while overcharged." 

"Nah. I've seen the squirt do better than that on his own. Think he got distracted by Chromedome's aft." He snickers, and there's a slur to the sound. Not a dangerous one, the kind that would have Drift confiscating his drinks, but a mild, happy, overcharged-on-life slur. 

"Funny." 

"I know!" 

Drift grins, canines pressing into his bottom lip, and allows himself to wonder if this is what the Well is like.


	4. Ratchet

Ratchet was a Forged medic. He was the only one from his hotspot to take on his medic hashmarks. His teachers used to say it was because Primus wanted to pour all his skills into one mech. Ratchet knew better, of course. There was no such thing as Primus; gods are just mechs' attempts at putting the universe into order. He was pulled from his hotspot a skeptic, though. Thunderclash had always mourned that fact. 

Thunderclash thought gods meant something, the idiot. Even if Ratchet had loved him, once upon a time - once, like all mechs did, until they realized he was too much and too big for it - he'd never thought to stop and believe in _Primus_ for him. 

When he was young his joints moved like liquid. He had the most nimble hands seen in forty vorns, even if his mind wasn't always up to the task of memorizing pages and pages of text. He never was the type for that slag, though. He learned best by doing. 

He thinks that's where his morality came from; he didn't start the clinic in the Dead End out of the pureness of his spark. He did it to find real mechs again, mechs that hadn't had their edges and their ugly parts all shaved away and smoothed down by the Pit of silvered Iacon. The goodness came after. First, when he had to coax them into his clinic, coax them into trusting him, coax them into letting him learn. It came in the slivers of smiles they granted him, hands that steadied slowly, energon taken from his hands instead of behind his back. Trust, he thinks. Iacon didn't have much of that. 

The next came when they died under his hands, shaking from overdose or worse. He could remember the name of every patient he'd lost before Dead End. By the second year he couldn't even remember how many. 

It made him realize how little his work had mattered, that he'd treated so few patients. His teachers had said that his skills were meant to be preserved, to be used only for the mechs who deserved them. That he was too great to waste. 

Then he was standing in a dingy clinic in the Dead End with a mech barely old enough to have lost his new car smell convulsing in death throws he didn't know how to stop, and he realized that what they told him was a lie. He wasn't the best. He wasn't even good. _He couldn't save them_. He didn't. Not until learned better. Not until his hands were so soaked with energon that his joints gummed up and his hands twitched with exhaustion. 

He left himself in that room, that little clinic. Even when he went back to Iacon, served the Prime he knew wasn't serving the people in turn, he stayed there, tallying bodies and supplies and reasons to go back. 

Dead End burns, during the war. It burns like all of Cybertron does, except the Dead End burns first.


End file.
